The grand duchy’s government wants to create “a 25km-long testbed”, Peter Sodermans said in an interview with Data Economy, an industry publication, published on 5 July.

Sodermans is a senior advisor at Digital Lëtzebuerg, a government umbrella group for several technology promotion initiatives.

Data Economy quoted Sodermans as saying:

“California companies, the ones working on connected car connectivity such as vehicle to vehicle (V2V), vehicle to consumer (V2C), vehicle to everything (V2X), are coming to Luxembourg.”

He then stated:

“We will explore and find Californian companies that are already interested in this.”

The country’s 5G mobile network and “data centre power” are key selling points, according to the article.

The publication did not name any of the companies that could conduct tests in Luxembourg, nor did it indicate the timing.

“No formal decision whatsoever”

Sodermans told Delano on 6 July that it was still early days and there was no official announcement:

“We’re exploring setting up a 5G technology testbed in Luxembourg. This technology will bring ultra low latency, which would be an excellent application for connected cars technology.”

However, he clarified that: “No formal decision whatsoever” has been taken by authorities, “simply because we are in the early exploration phase at this moment.”

California companies

A spokesman for Uber told Delano on Thursday evening that the company is not involved in this project.

Delano also requested comment from two other California firms known to be testing self-driving cars. As of this writing, Cruise Automation and Waymo, part of the same company as Google, had not yet replied to Delano’s messages.

Suspended tests in San Francisco

Delano also asked the firms about safety measures for these types of tests.

Although Uber is not conducting tests in Luxembourg, one of its experiments in the US last year raised concerns about driverless vehicles.

On 14 December 2016, California’s Department of Motor Vehicles ordered Uber to stop trying out self-driven cars on the streets of San Francisco.

The firm said that a human driver was sitting behind the wheel and there were no passengers carried at the time of its trials. However, Uber did not have a permit to conduct the tests, according to the San Francisco Chronicle and Wired magazine.

The same day, a taxi dashcam captured a self-driving Uber Volvo SUV running a red light in San Francisco’s Soma district, home to many technology firms:

This article was updated with comments from Uber